chat signing was right

in 2022, mojang added chat reporting within minecraft, and immediately a moral panic broke out. years on, it’s worth taking a look back to see whether the endless warring was ever necessary.

do we need chat signing?

firstly, yes, the concept of “chat reporting” is probably a good idea. for a game that markets itself to (and is infamously played by) kids, having basic safety features like this is widely accepted. even if you think it’s evil for some reason, the blame here would lie with rating boards, anyway. besides, basically every platform has some form of reporting. people who were complaining about all this on twitter may have noticed that it, too, contains a report feature (and still does. mostly). some platforms do it more subtly, and some will hash out half the words you say. reporting is everywhere, and minecraft doesn’t get to be an exception. in fact, contrary to what you may have heard, minecraft did have a way of reporting players before chat signing was ever implemented.

if you visit the official help article about reporting players in MC:JE, you will notice a curious note at the bottom of the article which leads you to a form where you can report players, beyond the bounds of the in-game system. this is the old (and still existing) report system. if you bother getting past the captcha, you’ll see all the form asks you for is image proof. naturally, you might be concerned about the possibility of being banned over fabricated evidence, and this is perfectly reasonable. all it takes is a couple /tellraws to make an undetectable fake that you can use to ban whoever you want (this is what i believe was behind the recent ban wave that everyone forgot about after a week).

so, there are two systems here: a cryptographically secure chat signing system that everyone hates, and an easy-to-fake alternative system that no one seems to know exists. i don’t think it would be a stretch to say the general consensus would be that the former system is far better than the latter. yet when discussing player reporting, the secure system is the only one ever mentioned. overall people seem to think that getting rid of chat signatures would put an end to unnecessary bans. but i believe that the opposite could be true.

if we could show that we were mature enough to accept the “lesser evil” system, this would help discredit the old exploitable system. with less focus being placed on that system, the number of bans happening because of fake reports would be far reduced, making accounts more secure altogether. and just to reiterate: no system is not an option. what’s the alternative, chat being disabled entirely? locked behind a creepy age verification test?

player reporting would be far less of a problem if everyone stopped trying to get rid of chat signatures, which are actually the things keeping you safe.

is chat signing secure?

minecraft’s chat signing is incredibly cryptographically secure. yes, there have been claims of exploits, but the fact that the system has been pretty much untouched for 4 years should tell you something. it uses the same verification technology as online banking, meaning if you trust online shopping, you can trust that a chat message being signed means it does come from its original author. all that security information is then packed into reports that are sent from in-game, which is what makes them so much more secure than other forms of proof.

to break chat signing, the easiest method would be to steal an account (which has also been made much harder ever since mojang accounts were ditched). fabricating a signed message would involve stealing mojang’s root certificate, which would require a digital heist into whatever servers the auth services run on. while you’re there, you could probably also give yourself all the capes for fun.

yes, the early days of the chat system had flaws, which is why it had so many changes prior to its full release. but now, it’s been working as expected for years. again, this is why i believe the less secure “image proof” system was the culprit behind the ban wave (…unless mojang was heisted without anyone noticing).

conclusion

mojang is not fighting a war against server owners. there’s a reason they added features like server links, the code of conduct screen, cookies and transfers. they were mandated into having some form of player reporting, and they did so by introducing a dodgy form. years later, they come back, and give us a shiny new system which is far better in every way, and we respond by fiercely rejecting it?

it’s understandable to be averse to change, but we shouldn’t see this new(ish) chat reporting system as some big evil change, but rather as a better replacement of an existing (more evil) thing. and maybe we can get rid of the old bad thing if together we can show, hey, we prefer it this way.